Category: Listen To This

LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy has always been obsessed with aging, the process thereof, and the self-awareness of coming that you are no longer the cool person in the room. One of LCD’s most enduring songs, “Losing My Edge” – is about that. I’m a few months away from being 32, the same age when he wrote that song. I get it. I’m still heavily involved in being a music fan when many of my peers have turned their attention elsewhere. Even with that, the pulse of pop culture is evaporating under my fingertips. We live in an era of ‘everything now,’ but culture now moves so quickly, it’s almost impossible to decode the latest meme without a Google search or find yourself realize that you’re technically old enough to be the parent of some of the artists in the Billboard Top 100.

Then, of course, “I was there”. I love to gloat that I was at the ‘final’ LCD Soundsystem show at Madison Square Garden. The documentary of the final show, titled Shut Up and Play The Hits, is a defining moment in rock history, sort of a next gen version of The Last Waltz. It was a four hour long show, a sort of euphoria mixed with a wry sadness. In essence, it was a really big Irish wake. Hearing last year that the group was reforming, I couldn’t help feeling a little put off by it. But it wasn’t without precedent – even The Band mostly got back together after The Last Waltz. The difference here is that they never truly released an album that stood next to their classic material. But with American Dream, LCD Soundsystem managed to.

Released today, the album is not exactly about that, but there are parts of it that show a wisened Murphy bringing the sounds of his youth to the forefront. Many of songs on this album are reminiscent so much of Robert Fripp or coke-era Bowie – a sound that somehow hasn’t been strip-mined within an inch of it’s life – recast as a way to transmit Murphy’s state of mind.

As with any LCD Soundsystem album, there are endless quips that strike with their *realness* – take “Emotional Haircut” for example: “You got numbers on your phone of the dead that you can’t delete/And you got life-affirming moments in your past that you can’t repeat,” or on “Tonite” which sounds the closest thing like a paint-by-numbers LCD song as it gets before Murphy observes – “Everybody’s singing the same song/It goes tonight, tonight, tonight, tonight, tonight, tonight/I never realized these artists thought so much about dying”.

Dying. The album’s most emotional moment is the 12-minute closer “Black Screen” which is clearly about Murphy’s friendship with David Bowie during his final years. Murphy contributed elements to Bowie’s final album Blackstar. Words here really can’t do it justice. Listen to it in a quiet space when you’re alone. It may be the most vulnerable Murphy has ever sounded on record.

American Dream is an album that in no way sounds like a rehash. Even the songs that sound like “Classic LCD” have an undercurrent that places them out of time. The themes that Murphy sings about might be similar, but make no mistake, this is a band that has been somewhere, has grown older and better. By all accounts, they’re here to stay. May we all accept aging and the evolution of “cool” as well as they have. What a great example to have. By all accounts, they’re here to stay. May we all accept aging and the evolution of “cool” as well as they have. What a great example to have.

My first experience with The War On Drugs is in 2009 when I saw them open up five times for The Hold Steady. They had just released Wagonwheel Blues, a promising, if not wholly remarkable debut. Adam Granduciel quickly identified me night-to-night as “Phillies shirt guy” because of the shirt I wore one of the nights. He and Dave Hartley and their drummer at the time signed my copy of the LP. I saw Adam play with Kurt Vile the next few years, was surprised by the release of 2011’s Slave Ambient, and watched the band skyrocket on the heels of 2014’s brilliant Lost in the Dream. It’s been remarkable to watch a band like that come full circle, but nothing could prepare for the release of their latest, A Deeper Understanding.

To put it bluntly: this is a really special album. It’s both accessible and ethereal, somehow operating as both a passive listen and intensely rewarding for much more detailed listeners. I keep playing it over and over, revealing bits I simply missed before. How often is an album both good for the passivity of a long drive but dense enough for headphone listening? There are moments that exist here that you don’t really notice until you focus, sort of like when you focus on taking a deep breath. You’re always *doing* it, but not until you take time to really concentrate, it’s then you are cognizant of the process.

A Deeper Understanding is an album that passes through your body with each inhale and exhale, with an ability to make you feel *something*. Sometimes that feeling that doesn’t always have a word to describe it. It envelopes you in sound, feeling heavy without the properties of being solid. Maybe that’s not for you, but damn if it’s not remarkable that something like this can exist today, when there are so many options to blunt those feelings. It invites you to come close, to be intimate, and reminds you what it’s like to be alive.

Sheer Mag’s debut LP Need To Feel Your Love is not for cynics or the cold of heart—rather, this is music for humid summer nights and the kind of dumb, hopeless romanticism that you know you’re absolutely too old to be clinging to, but still keep tucked away, just in case. The band continues the grand tradition of cheap beer, dim lights and the kind of sneering but soulful approach to our beloved rock ‘n’ roll that’ll make you miss them well before the lights come up.

Much is been made (rightfully) of the band’s encyclopedic grasp of 20th century rock (and funk, and soul, and disco) tropes and tricks, and much like those bands of yore, whether not you get anything out of it in 2017 comes down to whether or not you want to.The good news? There’s plenty of reason to want to.

Frontwoman Tina Halladay’s showstopping vocal delivery is reason enough to hang around, and the rest of the band shifts stylistically on a dime—think of the best cover bands or classic rock DJs, and the way they can somehow convince you to mouth along to “Wonderwall” for the nth time once they’ve got the crowd where they want ‘em. That fluency is obvious from the start in the one-two punch of charging leadoff track “Meet Me In The Street” and the subsequent grooving title track.

Much like the best live performances, the band starts to relax and take more chances as time wears on. The latter half of the album sees more welcome stylistic divergences like “Pure Desire,” a slinkier, more laid-back affair that sounds, well, exactly like the title. Requisite Chill Song “‘Til You Find The One” showcases Halladay’s voice mostly without the reverb and distortion that it’s coated in for the other songs. Much like the band at large, it’s great to finally hear her mastery of her instrument outside of the more lo-fi sound of previous efforts.

Again, your mileage may vary, depending on your willingness to suspend disbelief and let the band take you where they will. If I were you, I’d hop in the backseat and let them steer for a while.

If you’re anything like most Americans (or, y’know, fans of civilization) these days, your mood probably swings wildly between blinding, bitter disgust, full-blown existential terror and the sense of being a burned out human husk with increasingly distant memories of a time when the future didn’t seem like something you needed to be terrified of.

The notion that we were gonna get through 2016, dust ourselves off and snap right back into a time before Everything Sucked Forever didn’t play out exactly how we hoped, huh? The world turns, people get born, people get dead, and there’s all that shit that goes on in between. But there’s a newly pervasive gallows humor that’s soaked into everyday life, since, well, how else are you gonna deal?

All this is to say that when Great Grandpa vocalist Alex Menne murmurs “All my friends are almost dead,” a minute or so into “All Things Must Behave” from their new LP Plastic Cough, you’ll get where she’s coming from.

The Seattle group is comprised of Menne, guitarist/vocalist Patrick Goodwin, bassist Carrie Miller, drummer Cam LaFlam, and guitarist Dylan Hanwright. Plastic Cough is a collection of songs that careen wildly from cautiously optimistic to burnout blues at about the same pace as the collective conscience of rational people who simply don’t want the world to end.

Menne’s voice has been rightfully compared to Speedy Ortiz’s Sadie Dupuis (a compliment of the highest order), and really, the comparison is apt for most of the band’s offerings here—an array of gleefully bludgeoning fuzz riffs and strategically deployed dissonance. The production isn’t necessarily slick—it’s gently hazy, which imbues the upbeat but sinister shamble pop of singles “Teen Challenge” and “Expert Eraser” with a just-holding-together vibe that makes the band’s underlying pop sensibility all the more staggering.

Those tracks are catchy and fun, but standout track and second single “Fade” is something different altogether. Goodwin and Hanwright alternate between interlocking tapped melodic lines and slamming choruses while Menne puts on a contemporary rock vocal clinic. It’s a showcase for the entire band, but LaFlam and Miller deserve special notice for their ability to keep a groove, no matter how rollercoaster-like the arrangements get. There’s not a bass slide or snare crack out of place in the entire thing.

“[Fade] is about “the dulling of pleasure that comes with repeated exposure to the same experiences, locations, persons, etc. and the small ways in which we struggle — and often fail — to find newness,” the band told The FADER. “It’s the feeling of knowing you need to make a change but not being sure where to start, constantly looking for the next rush.” Sound familiar?

At the risk of spoiling the ending, if you can make it through “28 J’S L8R” without at least a hint of a smile on your face, well, maybe we are lost. In a world where everything means everything all the time and most of that meaning ends up being godawful, a song that’s funny and dumb feels like a desperately needed envoy from the world I want to live in.

You’d think that a band that titled their album The World’s Best American Band may be getting ahead of themselves. But not every band is White Reaper. They might have just done it.

The second album from the Louisville, Kentucky natives somehow takes elements of ear-pleasing 70’s hard rock a-la Van Halen and a very coked-up Aerosmith, but imbues a punk immediacy that basically says ‘we can’t fuck with these theatrics if we can’t get out of this jam in 3 minutes or less’ – only two songs pass four minutes – one of those just barely does it.

The album’s best song is “Judy French,” a simple love song full of compressed guitars and keyboards that dance together with vocalist/guitarist Tony Esposito’s wild wail. Just as it sounds like the main riff is about to end, another grows in its place like some sonic hydra before launching into a blistering solo. It is one of 2017’s best songs, no matter what else is released this year.

“Little Silver Cross” slows things down a bit on a bed of synth keys, but the pace picks up quickly edging toward the chorus, as Esposito seems to almost command singing ‘too slow’ – the chorus bursts into something sounding a little euphoric – the message going from ‘too slow’ to ‘you gotta be good to yourself’. It’s a great catch your breath moment on a record with serious power riffage.

Songs like “The Stack” disarm with its glam stomp – the rhythm section on this album is VICIOUS – before it launches into some serious barroom piano shit. Sure, the lyrics indicate this is song about boys and girls in America – just like so many others on this record, but it doesn’t matter. They all just rule.

If I’m being honest, it really doesn’t matter where you start on The World’s Best American Band. Any point is fine, and that is not a usual recommendation. I’ve spent the past few weeks playing it start to finish, finish to start, and even shuffled it for shits and giggles. It’s a rock and roll prism that refracts its light in any direction. Sometimes the most revelatory things you come back to don’t really to teach you anything. Just like Esposito says on “Tell Me” – sometimes you just need to hear about “the mean kids crashing the bars and the good kids torching their cars”. Depth is for the birds.

It’s a weird feeling to be in transition: constantly thinking about where to go next, the thrill of excitement just out of reach, and possibility feeling so endless that it’s overwhelming. What do you do?

With Near to the Wild Heart of Life, Japandroids first album in almost five years, that feeling of being flux is everywhere – literally. Song titles contain words like “near” “to” and one song is simply named “North East South West”. It’s a record about growing up, moving on, and exploding the tiny moments in life that feel so much bigger in retrospect than they do in the moment.

Both 2009’s Post-Nothing and 2012’s Celebration Rock faced some criticism for sounding somewhat piecemeal in their sequencing. The latest album represents the first time the band feels like they’ve done something deliberate – and it works. As two guys from Vancouver bashing out some of the most euphoric jams that could be made two people at a time. By slowing down and looking a little more inward, they have made something that really feels like an album, as they’ve detailed in notes for the release. “Side A and side B each follow their own loose narrative. Taken together as one, they form an even looser narrative, with the final song on side B acting as an epilogue.” While they’ve succeeded, they may have done it at the cost of throwing off any fans who were expecting Celebration Rock II.

The production is larger and the songs have a sense of space not found on previous Japandroids records. Make no mistake, this record still has plenty of the fiery romanticism and the hooks that made the band so irresistible, but there is simple separation in the sounds to take that all in. There’s prominent synthesizers – the warped 7-minute “Arc of Bar” is a great example– and then another sound not found on previous Japandroids releases – acoustic guitar strums on the gorgeous “True Love And A Free Life Of Free Will”. Just these small touches alone show that the band is taking small steps to distance themselves the bash-and-blaze chaos of the first two albums.

Like every Japandroids record, this one feels kind of like a small miracle. They are a band who feels like they’re just on the verge of disappearing at any time. They make some of the most immediate and visceral sounding rock and roll and really seem to take that role seriously. Perhaps that’s why they take long gaps between albums with nary a hint of when they’ll resurface.

In a sense, Near to the Wild Heart of Life reminds us of some truths that we all eventually face. Everything is constantly changing. Right now is the youngest you’ll ever be. Eventually, we have to all take chances if we want evolve. Sure, the album is not perfect, and some experiments don’t work. That sounds like life. It won’t bring us back to the time where we felt infinite. But when it’s over, it’s a small reminder to keep going in hope that next day will be better than the last. That in itself is a victory – at this moment in time, that is exactly what we need.

Near To The Wild Heart Of Life is due out January 27, 2017 on Anti- Records, with a special early release for vinyl on January 24.

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This site has been a lot of things over time. A hub for my friends to write whatever they want, a web magazine, the home of The Eternal Mixtape Project, and for the better part of the last half-decade, a place for me to put whatever I’m thinking…occasionally.
It’s the longest-lasting creative endeavor I’ve ever had and I’m proud of the body of work that's here, both of my own and those who have contributed.
Enjoy.